Author and columnist Sarah Kendzior was on vacation in Branson, MO, and went to the grocery store, a non-event which precipitated this tweet.

I was trying to figure out just how anti-gun this post is.  Ms. Kendzior didn’t seem particularly pearl clutching, and even followed up with this.

She is the author of the book The View From Flyover Country which is a collection of essays about politics from a Liberal in St. Louis.

She gives her professional credentials as:

I am currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail, where I focus on US politics. I also am the US correspondent for the Dutch news outlet De Correspondent. Previously I was an op-ed columnist for Al Jazeera English, where I wrote about exploitation, particularly in higher education, the diminishing opportunities of America’s youth, and gentrification. I have also covered internet privacy, political repression, and how the mediashape public perception.  My April 2013 article “The wrong kind of Caucasian” is the most popular AJE op-ed of all time.

I have also written for POLITICO, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Quartz, Slate, The Atlantic, Medium, Radio Free Europe, Opinio Juris, Alternet, HRDCVR, POLITICO Europe, The Chicago Tribune, The Baffler, Blue Nation Review, Alive Magazine, Ethnography Matters, Registan.net, The Common Reader, The New York Daily News, La Stampa, World Policy Journal, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Diplomat, Marie Claire, Centre for International Governance Innovation, Teen Vogue, City AM, World Politics Review and The New York Times.

Perhaps as a flyover resident, even Left of center, she was just illustrating America’s gun culture.

No tweet about guns goes unnoticed on the internet, and the regular fools came along to voice their opinions on this horror as well as devolving into typical Red State bashing.

But this one was my favorite

The answer is: it doesn’t matter.

Branson is a few hours drive from Ferguson, site of the famous Ferguson Unrest.  A series of “protest” in the name of a new “civil rights movement.”

AR-15’s and high capacity handguns are not for vampire ducks and zombie deer.  They are for arsonists and looters who might turn you into the next Reginald Denny (Yes, I know that was LA in 1992, but the horror of that video has been burned into my mind).

It’s not about ducks and deer.  It’s about keeping you from becoming a casualty of those – from Ferguson, to Portland, to Baltimore, to Berkeley, to Hamburg – who, more and more, think that smashing things, beating people, and burning buildings is the way to get their point across.

The Woman’s March wants to march against the NRA because… the march really has nothing to do with women and everything to do with far Left politics.

Who is leading the march?  Linda Sarsour of course.

This is the same Linda Sarsour that just called for a “Jihad” against Trump.  Yes, the leader of the Woman’s March issued a Fatwa.   She is also the same Linda Sarsour that is the vicious antisemitic “Anti-Zionist” who caused controversy at NYC and said Zionist can’t me feminists.

She also co-led the “Day Without a Woman” march with convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh.

So an antisemitic,  terrorism supporting, radical is going to march with a bunch of raging Leftist Progressives…

The same raging Leftist Progressives that kicked Jews out of the Chicago Dyke March for triggering the Palestinian lovers and then published an awful NY Times justification of their Jew hatred.

Against an organisation that protects my right to carry concealed.

She’s is the kind of person that makes me carry and support gun rights.

I presume she wants to fight the NRA to make it easier to take away my gun so her radical useful idiots can bash my brains in.

NOPE.

She’s gonna march.  I’m going to add another mag to my load out.

A Canadian sniper set the world record for longest confirmed kill at 3,540 meters.  Prime Minister Trudeau, in a rare display of higher order brain function, praised the shot.   According to what has been released about the engagement, that one shot saved many lives and disrupted an ISIS attack.

Canada, however, is too infested with pusillanimous progressives to let this go.

Sniper shot is no cause to celebrate: Editorial.  Justin Trudeau was wrong to suggest the killing of a Daesh fighter is cause for pride.

Here is the central thesis of this OpEd.

The issue isn’t the shot itself, which by all accounts was justified, but how we choose to talk about it.

However heinous we may find members of Daesh and their sympathizers, they are human beings. They have homes and families and histories. No matter their crimes, their lives are valuable in the sense that all lives are valuable, and deserving of at least some degree of respect.

No.  They.   Are.  Not.  Full stop.

ISIS makes videos of them butchering people for fun.  They light people on fire.  They murder children.  They force children to murder their parents.  They throw people off buildings and bury them up to their necks and stone them.

They do not deserve respect.  They are so bereft of basic humanity that I barely consider them human, at least in terms of respecting their human rights.

If you can’t muster the testicular fortitude to condemn evil enough to say “damn right we destroyed it, and we are proud that we took a stand against it” than all hope for you is lost.  You have morally equivocated yourself into worthlessness.

At times like this I am glad we have a man like James Mattis as our Secretary of Defense.   This is the man who said:

“The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot. ”

and

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”

Evil exists.   We must face that fact.  Either we can recognize the virtue in defeating it, or we can waffle and allow evil to metastasize.

Sorry for the rare posting.  Every time I think I have some time to write I find another box that needs unpacking, more pictures that need to be hung, or another bookcase that has to be fixed to a wall.

I think my loose items are breeding and making more things.

Hopefully I will be squared away by the end of the weekend to get back to regular writing.

Thanks for your patience.

I hate moving.

My wife sent me two articles to read.  The second one contained a link to a third article that I was also compelled to read.  Ruminating on what I had read, something clicked inside of me.  A thought precipitated in my brain that really starts to explain why I am occasionally the rage monster that I am.

The first is from the New York Times called The Muggle Problem.  The gist of this article is that the pop culture that tires to make the Harry Potter universe into an allegory on modern day politics is missing a large part of the picture: the muggles.  The battle in the Potterverse is between good and bad wizards, but neither of them care about the muggles, who they all look down upon.  The wizards are elites from an elite school and the muggles are just nameless masses to them.

The second is from the blog This Appalachia Life and is titled Blessed are the White Trash.  In this one, the author states that he grew up poor in Appalachia but is now a college educated professor working on a PhD and is middle class and is compelled to explain why Appalachia is the way it is to those who just see it as trailer trash coal country.

The article linked from Blessed are the White Trash is Digging in the Trash by the author David Joy and was posted at The Bitter Southerner.  It is similar to Blessed are the White Trash but angrier.

I encourage you to read these articles, as long as they may be.  They are beautifully written.

So how do I fit into all of this?

One aspect of the culture war that often does not get discussed is credentialism.  Credentialism is the over-emphasis on certificates and degrees as evidence of an individual’s qualification to perform a certain job or attaining social status.

The author of Blessed are the White Trash gets caught in the pitfall of credentialism.  Before explaining Appalachia, he explains how he is credentialed to explain Appalachia.  He was born poor and raised in a trailer, but now he’s a burgeoning PhD and can now speak from credentials of high society.

I think it was that, most of all that struck me having just finished The Muggle Problem.

Here are my social credentials.

I was born in an upper middle class neighborhood in Miami.  My dad was a rich lawyer, my mother was a nurse.  I attended a private Montessori school until the 6th grade.  Then I went to a college preparatory academy for middle and high school.  That school cost $14,000 per year.  I then attended a private college.  The first time I attended a public school since elementary school was grad school.

Here are some important facts about the high school I attended.  Our valedictorian and my best friend, went to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.  That is President Trump’s alma mater and he attended while Ivanka Trump was there and actually had a class with her.  He is now a Wall Street mogul.

Our salutatorian went to Yale (where Hillary Clinton went to law school).  The girls who graduated above and below me (I was 4th in my class) went to Dartmouth.  Our previous year’s valedictorian, and my next door neighbor, went  to Harvard and Harvard law, so did his older sister.

One of the kids in my class, he sat next to me in English, was the former Congressman of Florida’s 18th district, Patrick Murphy.

Another girl from my class is the up-and-coming Miami artist, Tati.

Another girl that graduated a few years ahead of me was the reality TV star and millionaire real estate agent, Katrina Campins.

Here’s the point.  I was born and raised into a class of people where I could have been a master of the universe.  I should have gone to Harvard or Yale, majored in business and finance or law and should be a hedge fund manager or counsel for the rich and famous.  It was my destiny.

I walked away from it.

Yes I went to a private college.  It was in Terre Haute, Indiana, the armpit of America.  I majored in engineering.

I moved to South Dakota.

If This Appalachia Life went from trailer to elite, I kind of went the other direction.

I didn’t end up in a trailer.  I’m by no means poor.  But I live in the “Deep South,” which is an unforgivable sin for Costal Elites.

I work in manufacturing with with people who working class, on an assembly line who come from the poor south.  I made friends in Indiana with people who grew up podunk on the edge of soybean fields.  I made friends in South Dakota with people who had cow shit on their boots, growing up in ranch land, where the once-a-month trip into town to go to the Wal-Mart was a big deal worthy of putting on the good clothes.

With the exception of my Wall Street buddy who I still talk to, I feel closer to the shit kickers and factory workers than I do the coastal elite.

These working people are more to me than maids and drivers and some demographic I can talk about in general terms at a wine tasting, I cannot condescend to them.

When I hear some Ivy League educated elitist say shit about the Midwest or Deep South it makes the rage monster inside of me seethe and want to smash things.  I have become a Midwesterner and now a Southerner.

I’ve been back to Miami and to alumni events and have heard the condescension because of the choices I made.  They condescend to me now.  I was born into the wizarding world and became a muggle.

I want to scream at the top of my lungs “I know you fuckers.  I come from your world.  You are not better than us.  You are not smarter than us.  You are not holier than us.  You sons-of-bitches think you are because you went to one of a handful of elite schools where you were told you attained status by being able to afford a diploma from there.  You bought your virtue, you didn’t earn it.  You have no right to look down upon us and make us bend at the knee before you.”

I have broken bread with the people who think they are kings and I know that they are every bit as ignorant as you can imagine but feel they are right by some divine right of Ivy League credientialism.

The more I hear the elites talk down to the people I sweat along side of, the more it makes the sans culottes blood flow in my veins.

I loathe with every cell of my body the Costal Elite bubble because I know the true, shitty, nature of the people inside of it.  I know they are not kings nor selected by god for a higher purpose.  I know they think they know better because they have been told all their lives that they are right because of the schools they attended and the circles they run in.

To them a Liberal Confirmation Bias philosophy major from Harvard knows more about the world and how to run it than a business major from the University of Alabama.  Actual, factual, knowledge be damned.  A Harvard man is never wrong.

Except they are wrong, most of the time.  Before Harvard man was minted into the elite circles, I remember him spending his summers as a clerk for his dad, drinking himself stupid every night.  Now, with a framed piece of parchment proclaiming “Veritas” in hand, he feels that he has the right to condescend to me and the people I work with because of our geographical location.

Fuck him, and all of his elite friends.

They are not kings, and I will not bow before them.

Antifa in Chicago has started a fight club training group to teach Leftists “self defense.”  It is for Antifa and other “marginalized groups” no Right Wingers allowed.

The video of their training is priceless.  Look at these gender neutral puds throwing wimpy air punches.

They don’t need to tell me that they are a safe space for people who are not part of the “hetero-normative macho gym culture,” their body language is screaming it.

This video is even more pathetic than the Antifa John Brown Gun Club one.

But I’m going to give the same warning as I did before.  They are training.  They are practicing.  Sure, none of these people are going to turn into the next Ronda Rousey, but they don’t need to.  They just need to be able to throw one punch hard enough that when they get a lucky shot in, it does some damage.

They are preparing to tussle.  Are you?